In an article on Slyck.com ( http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=609 ), the author improperly refers to infoAnarchy as a "Wikipedia". The relevant excerpt reads:
InfoAnarchy.org has been involved with the P2P community for a considerable amount of time - about the same as Zeropaid and Slyck. Like P2Pnet.net, InfoAnarchy.org contains an impressive amount of original content written by owner Erik Möller. One of its major accomplishments is an extensive Wikipedia http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page containing a wealth of P2P and file-sharing information. Members of the site maintain the Wikipedia. All InfoAnarchy.org needs is more frequent news updates to make this a leading P2P news site.
I've already sent an email to Slyck in a public relations capacity, so we don't need to flood them with more. However, I think it would be helpful if Erik would also contact them, since he runs infoAnarchy, to help make sure this kind of confusion doesn't get perpetuated. Because Wikipedia is easily the largest and most recognizable wiki, we need to be vigilant against people misusing the Wikipedia name if we intend to protect our trademarks.
--Michael Snow
--- Michael Snow wikipedia@earthlink.net wrote:
In an article on Slyck.com ( http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=609 ), the author improperly refers to infoAnarchy as a "Wikipedia". The relevant excerpt reads:
InfoAnarchy.org has been involved with the P2P
community for a
considerable amount of time - about the same as
Zeropaid and Slyck.
Like P2Pnet.net, InfoAnarchy.org contains an
impressive amount of
original content written by owner Erik M�ller. One
of its major
accomplishments is an extensive Wikipedia
http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
containing a
wealth of P2P and file-sharing information.
Members of the site
maintain the Wikipedia. All InfoAnarchy.org needs
is more frequent
news updates to make this a leading P2P news site.
I've already sent an email to Slyck in a public relations capacity, so we don't need to flood them with more. However, I think it would be helpful if Erik would also contact them, since he runs infoAnarchy, to help make sure this kind of confusion doesn't get perpetuated. Because Wikipedia is easily the largest and most recognizable wiki, we need to be vigilant against people misusing the Wikipedia name if we intend to protect our trademarks.
--Michael Snow
Is there any good reason why we don't place a trade mark symbol (or registered trade mark, if appropriate) next to the word "Wikipedia" at the top of each page? Or somewhere? I know the symbol is not needed for the word to be a trademark, but I think the symbol would help reinforce to various parties that the word is indeed a trademark.
Seems like a simple step. Can't see that it would hurt.
-Rich Holton
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On Wed, Nov 17, 2004 at 09:35:14PM -0800, Rich Holton wrote:
Seems like a simple step. Can't see that it would hurt.
It does. Also it's fun to laugh about folks and journalists who are too stupid to know the difference between Wikipedia and a wiki.
ciao, tom
On Wed, 17 Nov 2004 21:35:14 -0800 (PST), Rich Holton rich_holton@yahoo.com wrote:
Is there any good reason why we don't place a trade mark symbol (or registered trade mark, if appropriate) next to the word "Wikipedia" at the top of each page? Or somewhere?
This was suggested before - specifically, to put it in the "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" message on each page - and personally I approved of the idea. But some complained that it would look ugly, or in one user's words "so corporate ... it makes me want to puke." So essentially no consensus was reached, and the idea was essentially forgotten. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Fromwikipedia#Wikipedia_Trademar...
Out of interest, when clearing up naming issues like this, you might (or might not) find it useful to point people at http://meta.wikimedia.org/Names which clarifies [or aims to] all the confusingly similar names that one encounters in the Wikimedia and MediaWiki universes. (And of course, if you don't think it's clear enough, please edit it to make it clearer!)
An encyclopedia in the form of a wiki. My God, we can't have somone calling that a Wikipedia! Thanks for the laugh, Michael.
On Wed, 17 Nov 2004 20:27:58 -0800, Michael Snow wikipedia@earthlink.net wrote:
In an article on Slyck.com ( http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=609 ), the author improperly refers to infoAnarchy as a "Wikipedia". The relevant excerpt reads:
--Michael Snow
On Thu, Nov 18, 2004 at 06:39:02PM -0500, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
An encyclopedia in the form of a wiki. My God, we can't have somone calling that a Wikipedia! Thanks for the laugh, Michael.
I see no problems too. I think is cool Wikipedia be remembered more than a site or a trademark, but as an concept.
-Riba
On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 22:20:23 -0200, Ribamar Santarosa de Sousa ribamar.sousa@ic.unicamp.br wrote:
I see no problems too. I think is cool Wikipedia be remembered more than a site or a trademark, but as an concept.
But what if, as Rich Holton said, someone uses the term for something that goes completely against our goals, or in such a way that our image is tarnished? Or even, as I suggested, people deliberately trading off our name and publicity? And, as I mentioned, what about the confusion of people thinking that Wikipedia is the place to discuss things that have nothing to do with it, because they are "a wikipedia"?
(Hmm, he thinks evilly, this might get some people thinking...) What if Microsoft decided to rebrand Encarta as "Microsoft Wikipedia" to make people think they were getting something new, and equal in quality to the "real" Wikipedia...?
Having a name that uniquely identifies Wikipedia as being Wikipedia is very useful, and enforcing it as a trademark is the only way we can be sure of having such a name. What would we say if it became truly generic "the Real Wikipedia"? "the original and still the best"? "the Wikipedia wikipedia"?
On Nov 18.2004, at 16:42, Rowan Collins wrote:
as Rich Holton said, someone uses the term for something that goes completely against our goals, or in such a way that our image is tarnished?
And you're suggesting that this would somehow be different if the reference was to a Wiki instead of a Wikipedia?
Wiki software is far from ubiquitous yet (at least when compared with such things as PHP) and exerts a strong personality on sites that it's used to build (unlike, say, PHPNuke.)
To my mother, there is no difference between a Wiki and a Wikipedia. The risk your describing is real as long as the foundation continues to use the word Wiki in it's project names. This is quite distinct from the situation with Movable Type which, to the media, produces "blogs" but can in fact be used for much much more.
I'm not suggesting this is a bad thing; if the goal is to promote Wiki software rather than the Wikipedia, it's helping. I'm simply pointing out that it's perpetuating the confusion. -- Skot Nelson skot@penguinstorm.com
Rowan Collins wrote:
Having a name that uniquely identifies Wikipedia as being Wikipedia is very useful, and enforcing it as a trademark is the only way we can be sure of having such a name. What would we say if it became truly generic "the Real Wikipedia"? "the original and still the best"? "the Wikipedia wikipedia"?
Well, I do think Wikimedia has picked a rather poor naming scheme in terms of enforcing a unique brand, although I'm not sure what to best do about it. The scheme is essentially Wiki____, where the ____ is the project-specific name, but that's a completely generic naming scheme, because we are not the inventors, owners, or exclusive users of the prefix "wiki". This leads to a confusing situation where an arbitrary Wiki____ may or may not be a Wikimedia project, and there's no way of knowing without investigating.
So you end up with the confusing situation where it's: Wikipedia? that's us. Wikitravel? that's someone else. Wikibooks? that's us. Wikicities? that's someone else. (etc.)
-Mark
On Fri, 19 Nov 2004, Delirium wrote:
Well, I do think Wikimedia has picked a rather poor naming scheme in terms of enforcing a unique brand, although I'm not sure what to best do about it. The scheme is essentially Wiki____, where the ____ is the project-specific name, but that's a completely generic naming scheme, because we are not the inventors, owners, or exclusive users of the prefix "wiki". This leads to a confusing situation where an arbitrary Wiki____ may or may not be a Wikimedia project, and there's no way of knowing without investigating.
Yes, I'd have to agree there - although I'd tend to say "ended up with" rather than "picked", given the way the names have come about. But in a way, this makes it even *more* important that we protect the individual terms that *are* part of the Foundation. There's nothing we can do about a site calling itself "Wikitravel", but at least we can draw the line at someone starting a "Wikipediatravel" or somesuch (which would actually sound more like part of the same brand than "Wikibooks" does...)
--- Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Well, I do think Wikimedia has picked a rather poor naming scheme in terms of enforcing a unique brand, although I'm not sure what to best do about it. The scheme is essentially Wiki____, where the ____ is the project-specific name, but that's a completely generic naming scheme,
No more generic than 'The New York Times.' 'New York' is generic, and 'Times' is one of several generic names for newspapers. Yet put together it is a very enforceable trademark.
because we are not the inventors, owners, or exclusive users of the prefix "wiki". This leads to a confusing situation where an arbitrary Wiki____ may or may not be a Wikimedia project, and there's no way of knowing without investigating.
That is easy to fix. Just put "A Wikimedia project" below the logo of each of our projects.
-- mav
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On 19 Nov 2004, at 17:37, Daniel Mayer wrote:
--- Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
we are not the inventors, owners, or exclusive users of the prefix "wiki". This leads to a confusing situation where an arbitrary Wiki____ may or may not be a Wikimedia project, and there's no way of knowing without investigating.
So you end up with the confusing situation where it's: Wikipedia? that's us. Wikitravel? that's someone else. Wikibooks? that's us. Wikicities? that's someone else. (etc.)
That is easy to fix. Just put "A Wikimedia project" below the logo of each of our projects.
-- mav
<aol> <em>STRONGLY</em> support. </aol>
-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]] www.ropersonline.com
Daniel Mayer wrote:
That is easy to fix. Just put "A Wikimedia project" below the logo of each of our projects.
I support that we add the global wikimedia logo on all the projects, in the place of the GNU FDL button. We already say "GNU FDL" in the text portion. The global wikimedia logo should be linked to the foundation website.
--Jimbo
On Sunday, November 21, 2004 12:30 AM Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
That is easy to fix. Just put "A Wikimedia project" below the logo of each of our projects.
I support that we add the global wikimedia logo on all the projects, in the place of the GNU FDL button. We already say "GNU FDL" in the text portion. The global wikimedia logo should be linked to the foundation website.
This sounds like a good idea, so I made two drafts for such a banner: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Logos
-Arne (akl)
--- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" jwales@wikia.com wrote:
I support that we add the global wikimedia logo on all the projects, in the place of the GNU FDL button. We already say "GNU FDL" in the text portion. The global wikimedia logo should be linked to the foundation website.
That works as well.
-- mav
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Meet the all-new My Yahoo! - Try it today! http://my.yahoo.com
That is easy to fix. Just put "A Wikimedia project" below the logo of each of our projects.
Thinking about this, I came up with another idea: use a distinctive colour scheme. The colours in the Wikimedia logo are actually quite distinctive, and we already have one other logo using them (the commons, although no-one's got round to colouring the arrows green yet, which would make it even more consistent).
And one of the problems is that other projects using the MediaWiki software have a default look more-or-less identical to the Wikimedia sites. So what I was thinking, is perhaps we could have a "Wikimedia-monobook" skin that just had subtle shadings of that particular blue, green, and red; this could then not be distributed with the software [and we could probably even claim it as a trademark ;)] I tried to do a mockup of what I mean with the GIMP, but didn't do very well. What do people think, as a concept?
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org